‘Clapham,’ Gerald had said. ‘Take me to Clapham.’
He remembered little about the journey and could not be certain whether it had taken an age or an instant nor what route the cabbie had taken, but here they were pulling up in Commongate Road. And now he was standing in the doorway and he must have rung the bell for the front door was opening and Mrs Ashby herself was leading him inside. He found himself on the settee in the beautiful drawing room that he had visited, briefly, a few days before. There was no one else here, not the housekeeper—he had forgotten her name—nor the little boy, Marcus, just the two of them, seated side by side on the settee. He smelled again the furniture polish and the potpourri but it was mingled now with the slightly acrid smell of the coal burning slowly in the grate and with something enticingly like blossoms or tropical fruit or clean laundry or spice or all four. What was it? He could not place it.
She was handing him a drink, whisky and soda, which she placed in his hands and curled his fingers around, closing her own hands around his to make sure he was holding the tumbler, and he realised the smell was her, Mrs Ashby. The woman made of porcelain, perfect and flawless and utterly breakable. She had put on some scent, then, in anticipation of his arrival. But she had not known of his arrival until he had arrived. He had an idea he had simply turned up at her door, rather late at night, rather dishevelled and distressed. And now he was telling her about Ashby, who had died, horribly, in a tank that had been hit by an enemy shell so that nothing was left of him but a name. Not that he told her that. He told her about Ashby standing at the dockside in his khaki shirt and shorts throwing Gerald’s gas mask into the Nile.
Some time had passed for he no longer had the whisky in his hands, though he could feel its warmth seeping through him, and he was telling her that his little girl was dead, killed in an air raid, and when he began to cry and seemed quite unable to stop, she held him. She kissed him, slowly, tenderly, in the same way she had said that thing about the damned war: dully, as though it had ceased to mean anything. He felt the effects of the whisky muddying his head in a pleasant way; he felt her kisses having the same effect. He sensed something in her that was dead but that still needed to be stirred up like ashes in the grate in the morning, and his arrival, his tears, allowed her to give in to it. He wondered how he knew all this from just a kiss, her arms urgently around him. Perhaps he did not know it, was inventing a world for her to inhabit. She led him upstairs to the room she had once shared with Ashby.
Time had passed. It was still dark outside and he was glad of that. He had slept for a little while, he thought, but he no longer felt tired. It might be midnight, it might be eight o’clock in the morning and the little boy, Marcus, downstairs with the housekeeper whose name he could not remember, having breakfast.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know your name,’ he said, ashamed of this.
‘Marian.’
‘Marian,’ he repeated, tasting the word. ‘I used to know a girl called Marian. I went to a tennis party at her house in Ruislip. Do you know her, perhaps?’
Their voices were soft, not subdued, just hushed, like the morning after a snowfall.
No, she said, she did not know her, and he could tell she was smiling.
‘I’m Gerald.’
‘I know. You told me.’
Had he told her? He couldn’t remember doing so.
It was morning when he awoke again. A chink in the blackout cut a thin corridor of light across the bed, across her side of the bed, where she no longer lay. Gerald struggled to sit up, resting on his elbows, seeing her not far away, snapping her stockings onto her suspenders. He watched her, enjoying the intimacy that her movements implied. She looked up and gave him a gentle smile.
‘Sleep,’ she said, ‘if you like.’
But he was no longer tired. Instead, he watched her. She neither hurried her dressing nor slowed it down at his gaze, just continued with what she had been doing. As he watched he was aware of many things crowding around the edges of his memory, but for the moment they did not matter. He felt as though he were sitting in a large, airy room from which many rooms led off, and each of those rooms was full of a great many people all wishing to speak to him but, for the moment, all the doors were closed and no one disturbed him.
‘I’ll see about some breakfast,’ she said. ‘Come down when you’re ready.’
Once she had gone he sat up, placing his feet on the thick bedroom carpet, looking around her room—was it just her room now, or was there some trace of Ashby? He saw nothing but for a single wedding photograph on the dressing table. Was she the sort of woman who kept all her dead husband’s things, his clothes and shoes? He didn’t know. There was no wardrobe and, even if there had been, he felt no compunction to look. And then he saw a pipe, Ashby’s pipe, or one just like it, on the bedside table, right at his elbow where, in his drunkenness, in his preoccupation, he had missed it last night and had almost missed it this morning, and for a moment he could not move. He heard Ashby’s wry laughter.
He got dressed and went downstairs, finding her in the kitchen.
The child was there, Marcus, and Gerald paused in the doorway as the child lifted a toy train into the air with a whoosh on an imaginary track, caught up in his game. Then he saw Gerald and stopped to stare at him with Ashby’s eyes, reproachful, accusing—or just surprised, just shy?—before pushing past him into another room without a second glance. The boy’s mother said nothing about the child, attempted no explanation, simply poured him coffee and cut some bread.
‘No jam or marg; I have my toast plain,’ he said, remembering the rationing. She sat at the kitchen table and watched him eat his breakfast as any wife did in the morning before her husband left for the office, and for a moment Gerald imagined himself staying here all day, staying here forever.
He stood up. ‘Well, I should go,’ he said, and she smiled that same smile and nodded, and he had a feeling she would have done the same if he had said, I’d like to stay the rest of the day, I’d like to stay forever.
She got his coat for him. Ashby’s gloves were still in the pocket and she helped him on with them for the second time. At the door, she kissed him and said, ‘This war. It gives us situations, moments, we wouldn’t normally have. If we grasp them we shouldn’t regret it. There’ll be plenty of time for regrets and recriminations later, when peace comes. Till then, we must live, mustn’t we?’
This was her creed. And there was no question it made things easier. There were no regrets, no recriminations yet. They may come later.
He squeezed her hand and left her, slipping out into the frozen winter morning, just as Ashby must have done that last time.
Gerald’s train had been rerouted. They had trundled through Rugby and then Coventry so that Birmingham had seemed an inevitability, but at the final moment they had careered off onto a branch line and ground to a halt just outside Nuneaton. He was already tired of this journey, having made it now three times in four days, though admittedly it was never quite the same journey twice. The railway company always managed to surprise with its choice of routes. He found himself regarding each detour, each new station or branch line, with the incurious acceptance that every soldier cultivated in the army.
In any case, he was in no particular hurry, this time, to reach his destination.
It was a Wednesday, he saw, reading the date on the newspaper of the airman seated opposite. It had been a surprise to find a seat. When a very flustered young woman with a battered suitcase whose hat had come off had breathlessly boarded at Rugby there had been a moment of shifty-eyed and silent negotiation inside the compartment until the naval officer seated beside Gerald had gallantly given up his seat and the rest of them—two other naval officers, two junior lieutenants from the Yorkshire Dragoons and a captain in the Fusiliers—had breathed a sigh of collective relief and settled back into their journey. For the most part no one spoke, aside from an occasional exchange of cigarettes between the three naval officers, and no one seemed in the least surprised at the unlikely itinerary of places their train travelled through, and when the flustered young woman enquired if anyone knew what time they were due to arrive in Portsmouth no one seemed surprised by that either.
Gerald stared out of the window. Cathcart, his CO in Cairo, had told him to contact the divisional CO when he got back—not at once, but after a week or two. This morning he had telephoned the divisional HQ and been connected, after a lengthy delay, not to the divisional CO but to a Miss Littlejohn, whose exact position and location he had not quite been able to grasp but who had appeared to have been expecting his call.
‘Good news, Captain Meadows,’ she had announced in a plummy voice, as though she was studying his test results after a tricky exam or a medical. ‘You’re to report to the War Office, quartermaster-general’s office, on the sixteenth.’
He had been given a desk job. In Whitehall. Doing what, exactly, he had not the least idea. Something to with movements, supply, ordnance, logistics. The disembodied Miss Littlejohn had clearly expected him to be pleased and had sounded disappointed when he had merely thanked her and rung off. No more active service. He had done his bit. His reward, a desk job at the QMG’s office. He was forty-four. Soldiering was a young man’s game and when he looked about him at the faces of the other officers in the train compartment he saw boys a year or two out of school or university; not one of them had seen his twenty-fifth birthday.
He turned back to the window. The train had just started up again with a jolt. The problem was, he was unable to see himself seated at a desk in the QMG, could not visualise a Captain Meadows of the Royal Tank Regiment presenting himself at the office in Whitehall on the sixteenth. He could picture the office, oh yes, he could picture it very clearly—the buff folders in filing cabinets, the classified documents tied with red ribbons, the petty office hierarchy, the puttering tea urn that was always breaking down, the frantic search for the critical document that had inexplicably got lost somewhere between the office and the typing pool—he could see it all, could hear it, smell it even, but his own place there, the desk at which he was to sit, he could not see.
The train was now passing through Coventry once more. The airman sitting opposite lowered his newspaper briefly to peer out of the window. With the slightest raising of his eyebrows and a tiny, almost inaudible sigh, the man shook out his paper and resumed reading. With any luck, Gerald thought, the fellow would finish his paper soon and offer it around. It had been foolish embarking on such a journey without anything to read, not even a fresh packet of cigarettes. He hadn’t been thinking.
He had made himself not think. The telephone call to the divisional HQ had been made with a curious sense of unreality. He would not have been surprised whatever orders he had been given. It did not touch him. Any order or posting seemed to him inconsequential.
So far he had not thought at all about yesterday’s frantic and futile search. It had already passed into that same place of unreality. He saw himself, a tiny uniformed ant, scurrying from one location to the next, randomly and with no purpose, vainly seeking answers, fruitlessly following each new lead and running into one dead end after another. He was no closer to the truth, though now he knew that two people had died and had been cremated. And he knew, he had caught the briefest glimpse, of the kind of place the little girl had come from. Diana had said, What kind of life could she have, could any child have, there? It was a kindness to take her. And that was all the justification she had required.
He was no closer to understanding how his wife could have swapped one child for another. His mind recoiled from it. It was like trying to pick up something with buttery fingers; he was simply unable to grasp it. How could she do this thing? Discard her own child and take up another. It beggared belief. He would never have thought her capable of such a thing. When he thought of his wife he no longer saw the anxious girl at the tennis party, the exhausted but triumphant woman in a maternity ward bed who had just given birth to their child. He wasn’t certain what he saw.
He thought about Marian Ashby, viewing her and their night together with the cool dispassion that his wife had displayed when she had perpetrated her terrible crime. Had he done that, slept with Mrs Ashby, to punish Diana? He didn’t think so, but he was unsure. How extraordinary it now seemed! He would not have thought of himself as a man who would sleep with another woman. But there you are, he thought now as the outer suburbs of some large city rushed past the window: sometimes you surprised yourself. His wife had surprised him. Mrs Ashby had surprised him. Why shouldn’t he surprise himself?
Ah, here they were at Birmingham, and he felt a sort of grim satisfaction at the crushing, unavoidable inevitability of their arrival into Birmingham New Street. The flustered young woman seated opposite stood up in dismay, grabbed her suitcase and departed, and the gallant naval officer closed the door behind her and reclaimed the seat she had vacated with a little sigh.
In the end they reached Leeds from the north, going through Huddersfield and Bradford then on to Otley before swinging south and east and approaching the city from Headingley. If it was a route designed to confound the enemy, it surely succeeded.
Gerald had barely a quarter of an hour’s wait for the Wetherby connection, which was enough time to purchase cigarettes, a newspaper, some sandwiches. But he found he could not concentrate on the paper and gave it up almost at once. The sandwiches he similarly abandoned. He had begun to rehearse what he was going to say.
Another brief winter’s day was drawing to its conclusion as the train drew into Wetherby’s Linton Road Station, but there was enough time. There was no reason to delay the thing until tomorrow. He left the station, paused, lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, realising that he was merely putting it off. He tossed the end of the cigarette into the gutter and set off on foot, armed with the station clerk’s directions, and after a mile or so located the police station. It was almost dark as he walked up the steps and presented himself to the desk sergeant.
‘I wish to report a crime,’ he said, the words sounding odd and unnatural.
‘Oh aye?’ said the sergeant, an ageing and complacent man with a cynical tone who made a show of placing his mug of tea down on his desk and sliding over a form and a pen with a bored sigh. ‘What kind of crime is it, then, sir?’
‘A child has been unlawfully taken.’
The police station had an interview room and this was where the sergeant took him and then he left, closing the door behind him. Whether the man was gone in search of a senior officer or merely to return to his half-finished mug of tea he did not say.
Gerald pulled out a chair and sat down. Now he wished he had retained the sandwiches and the paper. Anything to take his mind off the next few minutes, the next few hours. The next few days. He closed his eyes. He had said the part of his speech that was rehearsed. From now on everything he said would be impromptu, unprepared.
He wondered if he ought to have warned Diana. She would be terrified—a police car driving up to the cottage, a constable rapping loudly on the door. He pictured her shocked, frightened face, her fumbled gathering together of one or two belongings, scooping up the child—or would the constable take command of the child? Diana would be terrified. But he had not even considered going to her to warn her of his intention.
Was this another way to punish her then? No, it was worse than that. If he had gone to her and told her his plan she would have talked him out of it. He lifted his face to the ceiling but saw nothing. She would have condemned him—condemned them both—to a lifetime of deception and lies. A life lived in perpetual fear of discovery, of public exposure, of shame and criminal charges.
And what of the damage to the little girl?
No, this way was better. Even Diana would see that eventually. He wondered if he would be there to help her see it.
The walls of the interview room were brick covered by a cheap enamel paint, half cream, half green. There was no window, no other furniture save this table and the two chairs. The table was bolted to the floor. Not just an interview room, then. He wondered where they would put Diana. They wouldn’t charge her; he was certain of that. Any doctor could see how the death of her own child had affected her. Grief, the trauma of the air raid, the sudden loss of a child, any part of it could turn a normal person temporarily mad, could make them do things they would not normally do. They would see that.
He began to count the rows of bricks.
The door opened abruptly on a youngish man in a dark blue double-breasted prewar suit that looked like it had never been fashionable even when it was new. The man who wore the suit looked like he didn’t really care. He was powerfully built, with prematurely grey hair cut military-short and fierce blue eyes that seemed to do a recce of the room and the man seated at the table before he would deign to come in. Why isn’t the fellow in uniform? was the first thing Gerald thought, but as the man, who was grasping the door handle in a vice-like grip in one hand and the frame of the door in the other now launched himself in an unwieldy and lopsided gait across the floor and towards the table, his reason for being in civvies was clear enough. Wounded in action or a condition that predated the war? Impossible to tell. It didn’t really matter, in the circumstances.
‘Brighouse,’ stated the man, sitting down heavily and slapping a file on the table, and it sounded like this must be the name of some top-secret mission or an enemy combatant he was intent on tracking down. It was a full second before Gerald realised the fellow was introducing himself.
‘Meadows. Captain, Gerald. Royal Tank Regiment.’
‘Oh aye?’ Brighouse eyed him thoughtfully, as though he suspected some trickery, or perhaps to make it clear that he wasn’t impressed. He waited, seeming in no hurry to proceed. At last he spoke: ‘A child unlawfully tekken, y’say, Captain Meadows? Your child, is it?’
‘No. That is . . .’ Gerald paused. ‘My child is dead. She died during a raid in London on the twenty-first or the twenty-second of last month. My wife was with her but my wife survived. A woman was also killed in the raid. A Mrs Nancy Levin of Odessa Street, Bethnal Green, but her child, whom I believe was called Emily, survived.’ He took a deep breath. ‘After the raid was over, with our child dead and the surviving child’s mother also dead, my wife . . .’ He searched for the right word, couldn’t find it, and decided to be blunt. ‘My wife switched our dead child for Mrs Levin’s living child.’ He stopped. ‘Is it alright if I smoke?’
Brighouse shrugged. ‘Be my guest.’ He shifted then, from one buttock to the other, a pained expression on his face as though his injury was bothering him. Or Gerald’s story was bothering him. Or perhaps he merely had wind. ‘Now then, let me get this straight. Your wife’s tekken some other woman’s child home with her?’
‘Yes. That’s about the sum of it. Or no, not home. That wouldn’t work you see, because the neighbours would see her and realise it’s not the same child. She brought the child up here where no one knows us. She’s renting a cottage from a farmer named Inghamthorpe at Kirk Deighton.’
‘What you’re saying is she’s trying to pass this other woman’s child off as her own?’
‘Yes. That is precisely what I am saying.’ Gerald felt something release inside him. It was out now and it could not be taken back. The secret was no longer his alone. Some part of him was relieved.
The policeman regarded him and a minute, two minutes passed.
‘And why, Captain Meadows, would she do such a thing?’
For a moment, Gerald didn’t know how to reply. He shook his head, spread both hands. ‘Because she lost her child. She’s not . . . thinking straight.’
‘Are you trying to tell me a mother simply hands over her own child and teks another in its place, like—like, I don’t know, choosing a new pair o’ shoes when t’old ones have worn out?’
‘Yes! Or rather, no, not like shoes, of course. But essentially, yes, that is what she has done.’
Brighouse sat back in his chair, put his head on one side and considered his response. ‘Alright then, why not tek it back? This child your wife took, why have y’not just tekken it back?’
‘Because until yesterday I didn’t know who the child was; indeed, I cannot say for certain that I am right now. I simply didn’t know where to take the child back to.’
‘But now you do know?’
‘I think so. But I haven’t been able to trace any relatives. I hit a dead end.’ Gerald leaned forward too, now. He still hadn’t made up his mind about this man, and he could see Brighouse still hadn’t made his mind up about him. ‘Look, Inspector, Sergeant, Chief Inspector—I don’t know what you are . . .’
‘Inspector’ll do.’
‘Look, Inspector, my wife needs help. All I want is for the child to be safely returned to its family and for my wife and me to—to grieve for our little girl.’
‘Do you now?’ Brighouse’s expression gave absolutely nothing away. Then he got up, picked up the file into which he had not written a thing and from which he had taken nothing, and made his awkward way over to the door and went out without saying another word.
Gerald sank back into his chair and found he had broken out in a sweat. Had the man noticed? It was chilly enough in here to freeze water. Brighouse would have noticed a man sweating.
Christ! And now it begins. How long would it take them to drive out to the cottage? He had walked there in twenty-five minutes in the blackout not knowing the way. In a police car it would take all of ten minutes. To conduct their business, another five or ten. And then the journey back. All up, say half an hour. Call it forty minutes, allowing for delays.
He stood up and went to the door, wondered whether to open it but thought better of it and instead paced up and down the room. The scene where two policemen—it would be two, they always did things in pairs—came to the door of the cottage kept playing itself out in his head. Sometimes he saw Diana submitting meekly to their instructions, understanding that the game was up; sometimes he saw her run from them in terror, clutching the child. And other times he saw her invite them in and offer them a cup of tea as though she were still keeping house in pleasant suburban Buckinghamshire, so wrapped up in her illusion as to be utterly oblivious to the implications of their visit.
He sat down and began again from the bottom, counting the rows of bricks in the wall.
The half-hour that they would require to go to the cottage and bring her back came and went, so too did the forty minutes. After an hour and with the tension too much to bear he got up and went to the door and opened it and was presented with a deserted and anonymous corridor that told him nothing. He went back inside and resumed his seat. Was it conceivable Diana was no longer at the cottage? That she had somehow got wind of his intention and fled? But where? Where could she go? He saw his wife fleeing across snow-flecked hills in the dead of night, dragging the wretched child with her, the entire Yorkshire constabulary after her with whistles and dogs and torches.
The door flew open and Brighouse thrust himself inside, crashing down onto the chair, slapping the same file onto the desk before him and leaning forward as far as it was possible to lean, an intent expression on his large, fleshy face.
‘Y’see, Captain Meadows, there’s summat I’m struggling with,’ he began, as though their previous conversation had never ended. ‘If this child has indeed been tekken then why is no one looking for it? Why is there not a bloody great hue and cry at this child’s disappearance?’
‘I have already explained that, Inspector! There is no one to raise a “hue and cry”, as you call it. No family member claimed the bodies. I could locate no living relative.’
‘Ah yes,’ said the inspector, nodding, pleased with himself, as though Gerald had just walked into a trap he had carefully set. ‘The identification of the bodies. A couple of telephone calls to our colleagues in the Met . . .’ He paused, clearly pleased with himself again. ‘Oh yes, Captain, we’ve not been sitting on our hands, we’re not the simple country folk you might tek us for op here. A couple of telephone calls is all it took to ascertain that the bodies you mention were identified by the local warden.’
Gerald gaped at the man, speechless. ‘Yes—I told you that!’
‘And that furthermore—furthermore—no foul play was suspected. Now, what do you have to say to that, Captain?’
‘I’d say you’re a fool.’
‘There’s no call for that,’ replied Brighouse mildly, and no doubt he had been called worse things in his time. He studied Gerald for a moment, seemed to reach a conclusion. ‘You were in the desert, I tek it? No, don’t answer—careless lives and all that. But still, you had it rough, you tank fellows. Don’t think I don’t know that because I do know it. Three years of it and now you’re back. Teks a bit o’ getting used to, don’t it? Picking up yer old life? Being a husband and father after so long away?’
‘What are you driving at, Inspector?’
‘What I’m driving at is that we have Mrs Meadows outside with the little ’un and she tells a different story. The way she tells it, you come back a week or so ago and it were difficult for the two of you, and with the little child who’d only been a wee bairn when you’d left. The baby had grown up, you and yer wife hadn’t seen each other in all that time. Bound to be tricky. We see it up here all the time. No shame in it. And she says the three of you come up here for a change, to get away, like. Some fresh air. And then, she says, you got into yer head that the child was not the right child, that she had swapped it for some other child. She said it became a sort of mania with you and, try as she might, she couldn’t dissuade you of it.’ He paused, seeing the expression on Gerald’s face. ‘Is that it, Captain? Is that what’s really happened here?’
‘Look at this! Here! Right here!’ And Gerald thrust his hand into his inside coat pocket and pulled out the three photographs of his child. He slammed them down on the table and pointed a shaking finger, not trusting himself to speak.
The inspector did not so much as glance at the three photographs and he did not pick them up. Instead, he carefully placed his hands on the table before him, interlocking his fingers, and his thumbs began to beat an impatient tattoo.
‘Aye, Mrs Meadows said you’d got hold of some photographs of a little girl and that you’d got it into yer head that they were photographs of your own little girl.’
Gerald sat back in his chair. That Diana could be so cool-headed in her deceit stunned him.
‘This is wrong, Inspector. What my wife has told you is a lie.’
The inspector made no reply. It was clear he believed Diana completely.
‘Why? Why do you believe her story rather than mine?’
Brighouse sighed. ‘Ask yourself, Captain: how likely is it that a woman would swap her own child for another woman’s child? Women—mothers—they form an attachment to their child, you see. A bond. They’re not like us. What you’re describing, well, it don’t sound right. It in’t natural. And I’ve met your lady wife and I can tell you now she in’t capable of such a thing. And that’s about the long and the short of it.’
Gerald laughed. Then he stopped, mid-laugh.
‘And the child? Have you seen the child? Have you met it? Do you truly believe that child is ours? That she isn’t a poor, lost, very frightened little girl who has been forcibly taken from her mother by a complete stranger?’
But even this did not shake the man’s complacency, his utter belief in this version of the truth. ‘I have met the child, yes,’ he said. ‘And what you’re describing, well, it’s not what I saw. Not a bit of it.’
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘See for yourself.’ Brighouse stood up.
Uncertain if he was calling the man’s bluff, or if he or the inspector or both of them were part of some elaborate hoax, Gerald stood up and together they left the interview room, went along the corridor to the front reception desk, where the desk sergeant watched him expressionlessly, then down another corridor, at the end of which a door stood half open. Gerald could hear the murmur of voices, a woman’s voice. He felt the muscles of his stomach tighten. This is intolerable, he thought.
Brighouse went first, pushing the door open and standing aside. He did not look at the occupants of the room, he looked at Gerald. Gerald stood in the doorway.
It was an office, Brighouse’s own office according to the name plate on the door, with a desk and a low table with chairs ranged around it. Diana was seated on one of the low chairs in her winter coat, her handbag at her feet, her hat and gloves on her lap as though she was having tea with the vicar. She was smiling and offering encouragement to the child, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor absorbed with crayons and paper. The little girl’s hair was brushed and swept back off her head by a pale blue hairband that suited her fair hair. She was bundled up in a winter coat that was a miniature of her mother’s but with the addition of a hood. Knitted red mittens hung from a cord at each cuff and her feet were encased in sturdy brown lace-up shoes and little white socks.
‘How lovely!’ Diana said. ‘What a lovely picture, Abigail.’
It was quite clear to Gerald that his wife knew they were standing there, the inspector and himself, that this little charade was entirely for their benefit, and it made a pulse begin to throb in his head, it made the little scene shimmer nauseatingly before his eyes.
But the child! How had she done that?
Diana feigned noticing them, looking up, and surprise and concern showed in her face. ‘Gerald,’ she said gently, and, yes, she reached out a tremulous hand to touch his arm.
All men had a snapping point. You didn’t fight in a war for three years and not know that, not see it, over and over again. A man, calm and rational and laughing one minute, a crazed madman the next, screaming to be let out of a moving tank, running across a minefield, picking up a machine gun and firing indiscriminately, walking into an enemy emplacement and shooting at men who had surrendered. Gerald had seen all of those things. He had wondered what went on in a man’s head the split second before and during the long seconds afterwards.
Now he knew: nothing.
One minute he was standing in the inspector’s office observing his wife, seeing her fingers reach out to touch his arm, seeing the child playing and absorbed like any other child with its mother. The next moment he found himself pushing open the swing door of the police station—though he had no recollection of leaving the inspector’s office—running down the steps.
And the child was in his arms.
It was hard to run with a three-year-old in your arms but his pace did not slow. He was outside now and he saw that it had snowed during the time that he had been sequestered inside the police station, was still snowing. He was running on snow, his footsteps crunching, the snowflakes swirling in flurries in his face, settling on his nose. He felt the wonder of it, even in his madness, after three years in the desert.
The darkness had come, too, and with it the blackout. He was making for the railway station, he was going to take the child back to her home, but already he was uncertain of his way. He slipped, pulled himself up and stumbled on, uncertain if he was on the lane at all or if he had lost his way completely. A bicycle reared out of the darkness, silent and with no lights, seeing him and swerving violently at the last moment so that Gerald felt it brush against his shoulder and a man cried out angrily, his cry lost in the flurry of snow.
He was going to take the child back to her home. He closed his mind to all else. It was easy to lose your way in war, to lose a sense of right and wrong, of morality. He had lost his way, he realised, as all the men had in the desert, or they would have gone mad, but now his belief in what was right was unquestioned and losing one’s sanity seemed a small price to pay.
Behind him, distant and distorted, someone cried out, a man’s voice, then a woman’s. They were on to him and he had only the smallest of head starts. And probably they knew the ground and had men and torches and perhaps dogs. It hardly mattered—he pressed on. The ground banked steeply downwards and he found himself at the water’s edge and he remembered he had crossed a river to reach the police station. He paused, fighting for breath, hearing the rush of the water. Otherwise it was perfectly still and silent. The darkness and the covering of snow deadened all sound. Even the shouts of his pursuers had ceased.
In his arms the child squirmed and fought but he pressed her face hard into his coat, steeling himself against his own brutality. He was doing this for her. It was the right thing to do. He would not let the child thwart her own rescue!
But how was he to cross the river? He turned to the left and made his way, slipping and sliding in mud, along the river’s edge. If there was a riverside path he could not locate it. If he was not careful he would have them both in the water. But there was the bridge, a dark shape dead ahead, the sound of the water muffled as it rushed beneath the arches. He scrambled up the bank, finding the road he had somehow missed before, and was up and on the bridge. But almost at once he lost his footing and fell to his knees and, weighed down by the squirming, terrified child, found it impossible to get up. She let out a scream, pounding furious fists against any part of him she could find.
It was almost a relief when they caught up to him. A constable and the sergeant came out of the darkness and onto him, one grasping the child, tearing it from his arms, the other pulling his arms back almost out of their sockets. He did not fight them. He had nothing left.
‘Let go of him! LET HIM GO!’
It was Diana.
‘Take the child to safety, please!’ She was still some way off but she spoke in such a way that the policemen released him; their hands were full anyway with the screaming, kicking child. They had pulled him up to his feet in order to tear the child from him but now he sank to his knees once more in the snow.
And Diana appeared and kneeled before him. How oddly ghostlike she looked. He was uncertain if it was the darkness and swirling snow that gave her this ghostly look or if she was, in fact, a ghost.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. She lifted him by his shoulders, searching his face. ‘I’m so very, very sorry.’ She brushed the snowflakes from his lashes and nose.
He put his hands on her shoulders, gripping her, returning her gaze. ‘Diana, it’s not real.’
And she sat back on her heels.
‘I know, Gerald, I know it’s not real. I know she is not our child. I lied to the police but I won’t lie to you. I’ve already told you what happened. But perhaps I didn’t explain it well enough.’ He shook his head uncomprehendingly. ‘What does that mean?’
But she looked away, at the panicked child, the two cursing policemen, the inspector a long way behind still making his awkward way towards them. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again she spoke calmly and steadily: ‘I need a child. I’m thirty-nine. I won’t have another baby. Gerald, nothing can replace Abigail, our child. But I need this. I need her. And I believe she needs us. Can you not see that?’
Someone had put a blanket around him and sat him on a chair. So far as Gerald could tell no one had been left to guard him. The constable had placed a mug of hot cocoa in his hands. They had left him in a room—not the inspector’s office, not the interview room—and he could hear distant voices on the other side of the door and he presumed they were discussing him. It was curious how little it seemed to matter to him what they said. The cocoa steamed quietly, a few lumps of the cocoa powder and flakes of dried milk floated on its surface. Gerald blew on it, instinctively, because that was what one did with a hot drink. When they had first placed the mug in his hands he had not been able to feel its heat; now the warmth was slowing penetrating his fingers.
Diana had said, I need her. And I believe she needs us. Can you not see that?
And now, oddly, he could see that. He could see that his wife needed this child. That she was not mad or delusional or deceitful. She was desperate. And perhaps the child needed them. He wondered why he had not seen it this clearly before. Perhaps he had just needed her to say the words, Nothing can replace Abigail, our child.
It all seemed surprisingly simple and straightforward. He sipped the cocoa and waited for them to remember him and come and get him.
After a time, the door opened and Diana came in. He looked up at her gratefully. He could see the inspector behind her, frowning, still making up his mind, unhappy at the sudden and unpleasant turn that events had taken earlier in the evening. Diana kneeled before him and took both his hands.
‘Darling, the inspector is concerned that you might be a threat to—to Abigail or to myself. Or to yourself. He needs to know that you’re quite alright now. Then he’ll let us go . . . won’t you, Inspector?’ She glanced over her shoulder.
Brighouse muttered noncommittally under his breath.
‘Darling?’
Gerald nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, quite alright now.’ He summoned a smile for his wife, another for the inspector. ‘So sorry to have been such a nuisance. Don’t quite know what came over me. I think what I need is rest.’
He stopped, and Diana looked pleased with this. She turned again to the inspector.
‘Aye well,’ said Brighouse with another of his frowns. ‘I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Mrs Meadows; you know yer husband better than I do. But you mek sure you tek my advice and contact that doctor I told you about first thing. I’ve seen a lot of this kind o’ thing up here. I’m no stranger to it. You tek my advice.’
‘Oh, I most certainly will, Inspector. Thank you. You have been so very kind.’
A car was found and the constable dropped them back at the cottage. It was approaching midnight, or long after midnight, and the child clung to Diana and eventually she lay on the back seat and slept, the teddy bear with the missing ear clutched in her arms. The constable lifted her up and carried her inside and Diana led Gerald to the armchair by the hearth. There had been a fire in the grate earlier and he gazed at the half-burnt logs in anticipation of a new fire. He could hear Diana dealing with the constable, thanking him when he promised to look in on them in the morning, he was too kind, they had all been too kind. He heard the door shut.
Diana got the fire restarted, found a blanket and laid it over him, placed another one over the child. She poured him a tiny whisky and one for herself, and arranged herself at his feet. The child lay curled up in the other armchair.
For a while neither spoke.
‘How did you do it?’ said Gerald eventually, nodding at the sleeping child who two days before had been kicking and screaming and uncontrollable in the corner of the room.
‘I bribed her with a bar of chocolate,’ said Diana, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. ‘She’s rather fond of chocolate. Tomorrow we’ll need to see if we can get hold of some more. I’ve used up my current supplies.’
Gerald gazed at the burning logs and thought about his wife bribing the child with a bar of chocolate.
At his feet Diana shifted, moving her legs to a more comfortable position.
‘You found them, didn’t you? Her people—you found out who they were?’ she said, her voice very low, almost disembodied in the darkness.
‘Yes I did. Almost certainly.’
‘And there was no one, no other family?’
‘None that I could locate, no.’
She gave a small sigh. ‘Poor little thing.’ And then, ‘Don’t tell me their names, Gerald. Do you mind? I think I’d rather not know.’
‘Of course not.’ A log collapsed with a soft crack, sending out a tiny shower of embers. ‘Would you mind if I asked you a question?’ he said. ‘Just one, and then the subject will be closed.’
‘Of course.’
‘The child’s mother. What was she like?’
Diana thought for a moment before answering. ‘Fearless. She was fearless.’
Gerald nodded, pleased with this. Pleased with his wife.